3dfx voodoo articles

Having a specialized API could be arguably said was both the highlight and the downfall for 3dfx. The Glide API when used in conjunction with Voodoo hardware optimized the overall gaming experience and for the few short years that Glide reigned supreme, several games based its 3d implementation in this proprietary API.

If you are old enough, odds are you owned a 3dfx card and played some of these games. Let us take you a trip down memory lane and remember some of the best games ever that used Glide.

Launched on November 1996, 3Dfx's Voodoo graphics consisted of a 3D-only card that required a VGA cable pass-through from a separate 2D card to the Voodoo, which then connected to the display. Voodoo Graphics revolutionized personal computer graphics nearly overnight and rendered many other designs obsolete, including a vast swathe of 2D-only graphics producers.

The 3D landscape in 1996 favoured S3 with around 50% of the market. That was to change soon, however. It was estimated that 3Dfx accounted for 80-85% of the 3D accelerator market during the heyday of Voodoo’s reign. Later on Nvidia would revive with the RIVA series and eventually land their greatest success with the first GeForce graphics card.